On Wendell Berry and Gracy Olmstead

As a writer and farmer, Wendell Berry has plowed the same plot of Kentucky hillside for nearly sixty years. The themes he tenderly brings to life in his novels and short stories—all of which are set in and around the fictional village of Port William, Kentucky—are the same he explores with rigor and subtlety in his nonfiction and poetry. His focus across all literary forms is community built on fidelity to neighbor, creation, and Creator.

Recently, Gracy Olmstead, a friend of Strong Towns, wrote an excellent piece about re-reading Berry’s classic essay, “Health Is Membership,” in light of the COVID-19 crisis. She begins, as Berry does, by reminding us that the word “health” stems from the same root as the word “whole.” To be healthy is to be whole. Therefore, full health—“health as wholeness”—can’t be considered in isolation from the health of the “culture, community, and ecology. It rejects the separation of family from family, as well as the specialized view of the self that severs body from soul—or even parts of our body from other parts.”

Read all of "We Approach Our World like a Machine" by John Pattison at Strong Towns.

Wendell Berry, Health, and Pandemic

In his essay “Health Is Membership,” Kentucky essayist, farmer, and philosopher Wendell Berry suggests that individual health cannot ever be divorced from one’s larger membership with the earth and its various communities. Therefore, as we remind ourselves of the curse and its implications, we must not just turn inward—but also toward each other, toward community. Health, Berry suggests, requires re-membering: resisting a culture that “isolates us and parcels us out.”

But how does this apply to our current moment, in which we are all, in fact, physically isolated and segregated from each other? How do we begin to deal with the spiritual, physical, economic, and communal devastation caused by the COVID-19 virus? What ought we to remind ourselves of, and what ought we to remember in a more communal sense, going forward?

Berry wrote “Health Is Membership” approximately twenty-six years ago. But its prescriptions and condemnations are well suited to our own complex, troubling moment.

Read all of "Wendell Berry's Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic" by Gracy Olmstead at Breaking Ground.

Podcast inspired by Wendell Berry's "Health is Membership"

The first episode of "Health is Membership: 25 Years Later" consists of "a conversation with Duke University professor, agrarian, and theologian Norman Wirzba on parenting, the erosion of attention, and relationships that cultivate the potential of every person."

Professor Wirzba has published several books, including The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age, Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight, Way of Love: Recovering the Heart of Christianity, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (in its 2nd Edition), and (with Fred Bahnson) Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation. He also has edited several books, including The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land and The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Listen to "Health is Membership: 25 Years Later."